Hester Reed was called. As the throng parted to make way for her to advance, I saw Ann Dovey seated at the back of the room, looking more dead than alive. Dovey stood by her, having made himself spruce for the occasion. Ann would have gone off a mile in some opposite direction, but old Jones's orders to all the witnesses of the former day, to appear again, had been peremptory. They had been wanted before, he told them, and might be wanted again. "You need not look such a scarecrow with fright," I whispered in Ann Dovey's ear, making my way to her side to reassure her, the woman was so evidently miserable. "It was the pills that did the mischief, after all--didn't you hear? Nothing need come out about your pocket and the powder." "Master Johnny, I'm just about skeered out o' my life, I am. Fit to go and drown myself." "Nonsense! It will be all right as far as you are concerned." "I said it was Crew's pills, all along, I did; it couldn't have been anything else, sir. All the same, I wish I was dead." As good try to console a post, seemingly, as Ann Dovey. I went back to my standing-place between the Squire and Duffham. Hester Reed was being questioned then. "Yes, sir, it were some weeks ago. My little boy was ailing, and I ran out o' the house to Abel Crew, seeing the old gentleman go past the gate, and asked whether I might give him one of them there same pills, or whether it would hurt the child. Crew said I might give it freely; he said two even wouldn't hurt him." "And did you give the pill?" asked the coroner. "No, sir. He's a rare bad one to give physic to, Gregory is, and I let him get well without it." "How old is he?" "Turned of three, sir." "You are absolutely certain, Mrs. Reed, that these pills, from which you took out two to give the deceased children, were the very self-same pills you had from Abel Crew?" "I be sure and certain of it, sir. Nobody never put a finger upon the box but me. It stood all the while in the corner o' the press-shelf in the children's bedroom. Twice a week when I got upon a chair to dust the shelf, I see it there. There was nobody in the house but me, except the little ones. My husband don't concern himself with the places and things." Circumstantial evidence could not well go farther. Mrs. Reed was dismissed, and the coroner told Abel Crew to come near the table. He did as he was bid, and stood there upright and manly, a gentle look on his face. "You have heard the evidence, Abel Crew," said the coroner. "The pills have been analyzed and found to contain a certain portion of arsenic--a great deal more than enough to kill a child. What have you to say to it?" "Only this, sir; only what I said before. That the pills analyzed were not my pills. The pills I gave to Mrs. Reed contained neither arsenic nor any other poison."